How Dick Cabela Sold the Great Outdoors

The origin tale of Dick Cabela, who founded the outdoor-goods chain Cabela’s, and who died this week, at the age of seventy-seven, begins with fishing flies. In 1961, according to company lore, Cabela bought forty-five dollars’ worth of hand-tied lures to sell at his family’s furniture store, in Nebraska. Customers weren’t interested, so Cabela bought an ad in the magazine Sports Afield, offering five flies in exchange for twenty-five cents in postage. When people wrote in to redeem the offer, he put their names on a mailing list, which he blasted with three-page-long catalogues of fishing gear.

Today, Cabela’s has $3.5 billion in annual revenue. Its fifty stores look like enormous log cabins, and inside of them hundreds of taxidermied animals grapple in lifelike poses—grizzlies rear up, rams stand atop plaster mountains like figures on a wedding cake. Cabela’s exhibits have been described as “natural-history museums,” and its stores are billed as tourist destinations. When a Cabela’s opened this past October, in Waco, Texas, people lined up outside for hours in the rain, starting at 8 A.M. on the previous day.

The growth of Cabela’s reflects Americans’ odd relationship with the outdoors: we mythologize it even as we pave it over. To accommodate their bulk and the crowds that they attract, Cabela’s stores are often built next to interstates and surrounded by giant parking lots. Generally, the only wildlife in sight are the crows picking over the litter. Some of the newest branches are on the edges of cities—Denver, Austin—that epitomize sprawl. In Greenville, South Carolina, where Cabela’s plans to open on a congested retail strip in April, other retailers are worried that traffic jams will scare away their customers.

Cabela’s has lobbied for millions of dollars in development subsidies to open stores. When it opened a store in Hazelwood, Missouri, a resident, Carl Fischer, complained to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It is ironic that Hazelwood is paying Cabela’s $5 million to build a nature museum in a mall that was built on 500 acres of green space and about 50 acres of wetland. Before long, there won’t be any place left to use the stuff Cabela’s sells. Maybe we can take our new tent and cooler and go camping in the nature ‘museum.’ ”

Dick Cabela travelled the world shooting big game, and his mansion in Sidney, Nebraska, is a showplace for his trophy animals. In an at-home interview that he conducted with Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the National Rifle Association, posted on the store’s Web site, the camera pans lovingly over the stuffed carcasses of a giraffe, a rhinoceros, and an elephant. Cabela wears a camouflage blazer; his wife, Mary, sitting next to him, is in an American-flag sweater. (Mary is listed as a co-founder of the company, but her role is frequently glossed over.) At the end of the segment, Dick says to LaPierre, “Hunting is a taste of freedom.”

Cabela’s, which has donated more than a million dollars to the N.R.A., benefitted from an increase of the purchases of guns and bullets through much of 2013 sparked in large part by fears that the Obama Administration would restrict gun sales after the high-profile mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Aurora, Colorado. Last year, Cabela’s revenue increased more than fifteen per cent, and its stock price rose more than fifty per cent.

But, as the White House has done little to advance its gun-control agenda, those fears have ebbed, and so have Cabela’s sales. Last week, the company reported disappointing fourth-quarter earnings—the camouflage pants and waterproof boots that men are buying cost a lot less than, say, a Mossberg semiautomatic rifle ($199.99, February’s advertised special). “The surge in firearms and ammunition is clearly winding down,” the company’s chief executive, Tommy Millner, said.

Dick Cabela embodied two, seemingly contradictory, strains of American folk hero: the frontiersman, typified by Daniel Boone, and the bootstrapping businessman of a Horatio Alger novel. In this, he resembles the Robertsons of the A&E reality TV show “Duck Dynasty,” who knowingly cater to redneck stereotypes while building Duck Commander, their lucrative family duck-call business. The show has generated an estimated four hundred million dollars in merchandise tie-ins. Cabela’s carries a range of “Duck Dynasty” products, and it kept them on shelves when Phil Robertson, one of the show’s stars, was briefly suspended for comments he made to GQ about homosexuality. The program remains one of the most popular cable shows, which matters a lot to companies, like Cabela’s, that are trying to get a younger generation interested in hunting. (The number of hunting licenses issued annually has been flat for the past decade.) Duck Commander and Mossberg are marketing a new line of guns, but it’s unknown whether Cabela’s will stock them.

Of course, what it looks like to have guns in the hands of kids depends on where you live: Do you envision 4-H members shooting at a paper target in an empty field, or teen-agers settling a dispute in an urban neighborhood? In his interview with LaPierre, Dick Cabela lamented his struggles to attract a younger audience, presumably unaware of the double meaning of his words, “We’re losing our youth, big time, especially in the inner cities.”

Photograph: Nati Harnik/AP

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